The large language changes are a burden, but it's something I knew going into it. And so far in every case, it's been well worth it. For example, 0.15 introduced the std.Io.Writer overhaul, but I really love the new API. I haven't started the std.Io change yet for 0.16. We'll see. And honestly, LLMs make this all way less painful... even though they're not trained on it, agents are able to run builds, reference docs, and work their way through the upgrade with huge success.

I thought that finding contributors would be an issue, but it hasn't at all. There's a lot of people out there eager to use Zig, the language isn't hard to learn (as long as you're already familiar with systems concepts), etc. It has been good.

I'll think about more to say if I write about this more but overall, I'm very happy with the language, the community, and the leadership. All good.

If you told me 3 years ago that terminal usage would _increase_ I would've laughed. Beyond that, I'm now having regular conversations with the frontier agentic coding companies (since they're far and away the largest terminal users at the moment) and if you had told me 2 years ago that that would be happening because of a terminal, I would've laughed even harder.

So, it's amazing. But overall, its amusing.

As for editing text, ghostty+tmux most definitely supports editing text with the mouse (even an in terminal right click menu!) although sounds like your intended use of select to delete isn’t common so you’ll need to do some customizations.

Tabs (and panes? I haven't tried yet) should work fine for regular terminal windows though.

This works on MacOS, and on Linux sometimes:

> On Linux, the quick terminal is only supported on Wayland and not X11, and only on Wayland compositors that support the wlr-layer-shell-v1 protocol. In practice, this means that only GNOME users would not be able to use this feature.

> Ghostty 1.3 is around the corner, literally a week or two away, and will bring some critically important features like search (cmd+f), scrollbars, and dozens more

Ctrl+Shift+G wraps the output of the previous command into a pager (say, less). You often only know you needed a pager after that output is printed.

Ctrl+Shift+E highlights all links on the current screen and assigns short alphanumeric codes to them, so you can open links without using the mouse. For example, `Ctrl+Shift+E 1` opens the first link, `.. 2` the second one, etc.

Ctrl+Shift+U opens symbol search where you can find & insert symbols using their unicode names. Emoji, TUI blocks, rare accented characters you need once in a blue moon, CJK ideographs, whatever.

For instance, in vim the F3 key was broken[^1]. It was very surprising and weird, and a portable workaround required some arcane vim configuration.

Another important pain point was that the font rendering was different in Kitty to any other app, and very dependent on the screen DPI. IIRC, for a DPI around 100, I had to switch to "legacy rendering" because the default rendering was barely readable.

I also remember issues with SSH. And Kitty crashed at least once. And I wasn't a fan of Kitty's mix of C and Python. After a week or two of usage, my Kitty config file was big, with an extra hundred lines of Python for the tabbar. Despite some nice features (like the shortcut to put the output of the last command into a file), I got uneasy with all this mess. I tried Ghostty, which was as good as Kitty with much less oddities.

[^1]: https://github.com/vim/vim/issues/13328

WezTerm is a very good replacement.

I like the idea of tmux but as another poster suggested, I prefer to just get better at my window manager to achieve similar results. tmux requires way too many key presses for me.

I hate mixed mouse + keyboard workflows as well.

BTW is there feature parity between macOS and Linux, e.g. scrollback buffer searching on Linux?

I really like this a lot.

1. The quick terminal feature is ghostty's killer feature for me, I switched to ghostty because of it. Could we make it first-class feature? Like, i'd love to have tabs over there too (like in guake/yakuake).

2. I have a white on black theme (white text on black background) but when i split vertically/horizontally, the borders between one shell and the next are not really visible and I have an hard time resizing them... Can you do something about it? Setting the colors of borders would be an okay fix for me.

host * SetEnv TERM=xterm-256color

In 1970 all terminals were their own thing, tied to a single host somewhere in the same building by a dedicated serial cable. The terminal didn't move or connect to random other hosts, and the host had to be specially configured to work with any terminal connected to it.

Since then, a few terminal definitions have become standardized across all hosts for decades, and terminals are emulators that emulate one of those 40 year established standard definitions, because today terminals connect to countless unknown new random and varied hosts that the terminal user didn't install and configure before connecting, and may not even have the admin rights to do so after the fact either, and even if they do, it's wildly and inexcusably awful to require that.

It's entirely backwards for a terminal today to default to asserting it's own new $TERM, and to characterize the problems caused by this as "the user forgot to do this totally unreasonable thing" that no other terminal or terminal emulator has required for 40 years.

It's 100% a bug. The fact that it's intentional just means it's a design goal bug.

I work managing different systems for different clients and often login to systems for the first time. The servers aren't mine, and configuring something like Ansible to configure my home just seems like a waste of time for little benefit. It means that generally I end up using systems that are likely to be already instead - Bash not zsh, Perl, basic vim without any bindings. It might sound special but I'm sure I'm far from the only person working this way.

So given this, I'd always prefer a terminal that doesn't require me to change remote servers. In this particular case I can modify $TERM in my local .zshrc and it works fine so it's a moot point, but if I had to modify the remote system it would be a no go.

-- Pablo Picasso